Razorback Ridge and how they hold you like a gun

back-dated a few days. (tags whole RE for reference lmao)

She couldn't breathe.

The botanist felt it creep over her before it struck - and it came in a gradual, worsening wave - but denied it. Watery pools of moonlit ivy remained fixed upon the path as if it were her lifeline. Though her legs trembled vaguely and her paws slowly numbed, she kept walking. Her breath grew shallow and ragged but her lungs heaved; her stomach churned but she stayed upright. Her head buzzed but she kept going. 

Until her vision pinholed and went dark, when her legs turned to lead. Until there was no air to breathe and the hum turned to a roar. 

She couldn't keep @Reiko safe out here, nor was she likely to see her again. Neither would she ever see the royal children again - she would not see them grow, she would not get the chance to love them. They would not know her. 

She couldn't help @Cordelia out here. Or @Hiromi. Or @Vespera. She would not grow to know and adore @Kazuhiko or @Joheras or @Isadora. 

She wouldn't get to know @Ibis or serve her Queen. She could not train with @Yuudai or babysit with @Collision. 

She couldn't breathe.

The anxiety attack left as slowly as it had arrived, dwindling until she was left limp - curled against the stones where she'd lain down to bear through it. 

Slowly, the seelie blinked her pale eyes open - grimacing against the piercing light as she drug herself onto her elbows. Shakily, Awenfen pushed to her paws and began to plod onwards once more. 

The threat of Aliroth was always hanging, a guillotine blade that would fall if her withdrawal wasn't quick enough.

hope it is ok for me to drop in here!! :)

the long spine of the mountain is almost a comforting thing; his paws slip down and across the rock, a reminder of his suitability here like teeth to his throat, but as much as it poses a danger there is still something settling about it. there is nowhere to hide, here; there is nothing but the crumbling rock and beyond it there is the knife-sheer edges of the ridge, tumbling down into empty void.

with one misplaced step, he would tumble down the sides. perhaps his neck might snap against the stone; perhaps he might stay awake long enough to reach the plains below. he might bleed out there; he might starve. a single misstep and he would be gone. but if he has ever had any fear of heights, that has long since left him, and he walks the sides with a surety he would never feel if faced with the threat of another person.

for a long while, this is how he moves. past the rare tree clinging to the edge, and then nothing more than stone and sky. his breath echoes in his ears, legs aching from the steepness of the climb, but it is good. he feels safe. if this is hospitable to any other, cat or bear or wolf, caligula will see them in plenty of time.

so he does not startle when he sees the white figure moving ahead of him. a first, certainly.

he does stop, though. as much as the heights do not bother him, he is keenly aware of his own mortality in such a situation, and that of someone else. he does not wish to scare whoever it is who walks ahead of him, and more than that, he is not quite sure what it is. the figure is smaller than a wolf, with ears like tufts of grass, moving insistently forward and over the ridge.

caligula was once good at judging a threat. he led legions of bristling fur and gleaming white teeth into battle, with an eye for weakness, for anything they might exploit; now everything he faces may as well be a step into the waiting arms of a bear. but – and it might be the ridge itself, the heights at which he is perched – this figure does not worry him as, perhaps, it should.

his limbs unfreeze. he continues ahead, draws up a fraction closer before he speaks, though the distance between them is still considerable, as he prefers to keep it. “hello?”

omg of course! I've actually been hoping for a thread with Caligula :)

Vaguely, through the static still humming in her addled head, a voice registered. 

Blearily, the wyvern turned tightly on the narrow path to face the distant stranger - no more than a shadow on the horizon to her blurry eyes. 

"'ello?" She croaked back, grimacing as her throat crackled in protest, squinting as she dared a few steps in the mirage's image.

awesome!! sorry for the delay here :-,)

the moment the word is out of his mouth it feels a mistake. of course, he has well and truly trapped himself, the cliff sloping to valley floor all around him. not exactly nowhere to go – just nowhere to go but down.

but he has not run from a conversation yet – for all the messes he has made of them thus far, for all the wolves surely now questioning his sanity. at least they and he are well-matched in opinion in that department; this will not be the first embarrassment caligula makes of himself, and not the last.

she turns, and with her entire face in view, her appearance makes no more sense than it did before. canine, clearly – familiar eyes and muzzle – but, like her slight frame, the tufts of her ears and tail do not belong to a wolf. her voice, when she speaks, is little more than a croak – she squints when she looks at him, in the half-second before he turns his gaze away and over her shoulder.

he has not looked anyone in the eyes in years. this will not be any different. but the crack in her voice calms the instinctive tension in his limbs somewhat, such that when she creeps a few steps in his direction, he does not bolt; instead, his neck rolls back against his shoulders, tail wavering uncertainly.

an eye for weakness. as much as he despises it, as much as it truly means nothing now – caligula could not use his teeth if his life depended on it, and he knows that, and it is why every meeting freezes his voice in his throat – he sees…there is something here, in the shakiness of her own movements.

caligula does not only know these by training anymore. these are things he knows through experience, and that is truly what makes him pause.

he hesitates for a moment, searching anxiously for a topic to justify opening his mouth in the first place. the first one he finds, he catches right before it leaves his throat. asking her what she is…it does not matter, really, and it does not seem like an auspicious start to a conversation; he has enough presence of mind to know that.

instead, instead – he has never gone wrong with apologies. “i am sorry, to… i did not want to, ah…startle you. it would be…” his muzzle shifts briefly towards the cliff’s edge, though his gaze – even though it is fixed over her shoulder, not on her – does not waver. “not good. i think.”

he just about keeps himself from flinching. it seems inevitable that he puts his foot into his mouth every time, and still, “sorry.” again. for a long moment that is the last thing he says, shifting on the spot as he remains looking determinedly off over her shoulder, and then, “are…you okay?”

Blinking against the light, her sight soon enough readjusts and the shadows clinging to her peripherals dissipate - revealing the dark, burned figure before her with clarity. 

Fluffy auds twitch to attention as his nervous, fumbling octaves reach them - a tic at the corner of her lips the only indication of the sluggish, bemused grin threatening to overtake her features. She bites it back by whetting her lips, not wishing to make the male more tense. 

Fortunately for him, they are fairly matched in their social ineptitude. "It's quite alrigh'."

"I am..I, uh, I vill be," she stuttered, brain still humming and jumbled with frantic thoughts. "Zank ye, ser, fer yer kindness."

"I'm Awenfen," she blurted, seemingly at a loss for words - figuring that was probably the next step in such a conversation though she was no expert. Perhaps the anxious male would hurry along his path once assured that she was fine.

in the interim between his words and hers, caligula looks back to her face only briefly, and is reassured to see that her expression holds no hint of a threat. the quiet that stretches between them is more than slightly awkward, but he bears it as he bears all awkward silences – desperate to fill the void between them, to distract from the strangeness of his presence, and incapable of reaching for any word that will not make it worse.

luckily, she is, in the end, the one to break it, and for a brief moment his concern over his inability to maintain a conversation vanishes among the rising confusion.

kindness is not a word caligula has ever heard applied to him before. the notion is somehow more foreign than anything else he has faced since he fled; it is, of course, a terrible misjudgment, but even he is aware that there is nothing to be gained by dwelling on the point.

though it must be said. when one has done the things he has, what constitutes kindness is, indeed, a very low bar.

“that is…good, i…of…course?” his voice stutters painfully in his throat. at the very least, she does not seem much more confident than he is, a welcome change from those he has met thus far. it should be, perhaps, less stressful to speak to someone who also struggles with their words; of course, being the…the person he is…it is not.

so her introduction comes abruptly as most of his own. it does not stop his from faltering just the same. “ah. i am caligula.”

he pauses there for a moment, uncertain exactly where to take this. he wants to leave, of course – his brain is screaming at him to do it, despite this being one of the least awful interactions thus far – but it is. again. one of the least awful interactions thus far.

and he did not ask if she was okay simply to fill the silence – although that would not be out of character. more after the shakiness of her movements. there is something…there is something uncomfortably familiar about that. running for so long and for so hard, something he cannot think about for too long without –

caligula squeezes his eyes shut hard enough to see white. not now.

“you are…” his voice wavers uncertainly as he searches for the proper way to phrase this, fails, and makes an unfortunate pitstop at ominous instead. “what are you running from?”